I have a ton of work on my plate; including capturing 16 Hi8 tapes then producing DVDs from the source material. Using Vegas, the time it takes to encode/build one of my typical .mpg/.avi files is around 1 hour.

Given the number of files I am going to be working on, I am interested in cutting down the time it takes to perform the 1 hour 'Preview Render' step.

My first thought is to overclock my cpu; not a problem. Then I thought to myself that perhaps the best area/component of my computer to focus on improving is the slowest one, namely the harddrive.

I have a Seagate SATAII 160GB NCQ drive. I was thinking about grabbing a new WD 74 GB Raptor. I have been sifting through the posts on this forum and found some good info. What I would like to know is will this upgrade give me a tangible bump or decrease in that render time? In other words, could I see a decrease in render time on the order of minutes, seconds?

EDIT: 1.) RAID0 is not something I'm willing to consider. 2.) I know the Raptor is not the best value, I'm Ok with that

My rig:
Intel C2D E6600
Asus P5B-Deluxe WIFI Ed.
2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 4-4-4-12
eVGA 7900GT KO
Sony 16x DVD burner
Seagate 160GB SATAII NCQ (OS/Work drive)
Seagate 250GB PATA (backup/storage drive)
Enermax 435watt PSU
Lian-Li case